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(finding Jnterature 


ON 


The Texas Tlains 







- 









































Cjfinding Jfiterature 

ON 

The Texas Tlains 


By 

JOHN WILLIAM ROGERS 

With a Representative Bibliography 
of Books on the Southwest 
by J. Frank Bobie 

★ 


V 

THE SOUTHWEST PRESS 

DALLAS.TEXAS 









<7 




Copyright, 1931 
HOLLAND’S MAGAZINE 


Copyright, 1931 

THE SOUTHWEST PRESS, Inc. 



PRINTED IN U. S. A. 


PRESS OF 

BRA UN WORTH 8c CO.. INC. 
BOOK MANUFACTURERS 
BROOKLYN, NEW YORK 




FINDING LITERATURE ON THE TEXAS 
PLAINS 

I N their selection of Qoronado’s Qhildren, 
the editors of the Literary Guild looked to 
the Southwest. To some seventy-five thousand 
of their subscribers scattered over the world, 
they sent J. Frank Dobie’s book from the 
open range. It is the first time a book 
club has ever chosen a volume by a Texas 
author, and because of the book they chose and 
the man who wrote it, the event has signifi¬ 
cance not only for Texas, but in American lit¬ 
erature generally. 

Qoronado’s Children is a collection of leg¬ 
ends of lost mines and buried treasures of the 
Southwest. In the very first sentence of the 
book, Dobie disclaims that they are creations 
of his own. “They belong,” he says, “to the 
soil and to the people of the soil. Like all 
things that belong, they have their roots deep 
in the place of their being, deep, too, in the 
past. They are an outgrowth, they embody 
the geniuses of divergent races and peoples 
Is] 


LITERATURE ON THE TEXAS PLAINS 


who even while opposing each other blended 
their traditions. As tales I listened to them in 
camps and under stars and on ranch galleries 
out in the brush.” 

In the Old World, he points out, the legends 
that have persisted with the most vitality are 
legends of women—Venus, Helen of Troy, 
Dido, Guinevere, Joan of Arc. But in the New 
World, men have been neither lured nor re¬ 
strained by women. It has been a world of 
men exploring unknown continents, subduing 
wildernesses and savage tribes, butchering buf¬ 
faloes, trailing millions of long-horned cattle 
wilder than buffaloes, digging gold out of 
mountains, and pumping oil out of the hot 
earth beneath the plains. Into this world, 
women have hardly entered except as realities, 
the idealizations—the legends—have been about 
great wealth to be found, the wealth of secret 
mines and hidden treasures, a wealth that is 
solid and has nothing to do with loveliness and 
beauty. These are the representative legends 
of America, and it is in the Southwest that they 
have come to their full flower. 

Dobie has spent ten years in tracking down 
these legends. The story of the man, how he 
[ 6 ] 


LITERATURE ON THE TEXAS PLAINS 


started on his quest for them and his adven¬ 
tures in finding them, is worth telling. 

Today and for some time past, J. Frank 
Dobie has been a professor of English literature 
at the University of Texas. He is a successful 
teacher; both his students and his confreres of 
the faculty will assure you of that. But in 
looks and manner he is about as far from the 
proverbial college professor as it is possible to 
imagine. One does not think of a typical 
Texan resembling a professor, and most people 
who meet Dobie find him as complete an em¬ 
bodiment of the real Texan as you could see 
in a day’s ride across the range. Not long ago 
a group of professional men, all Texans, were 
sitting together. The conversation turned upon 
the qualities of a typical Texan and one of the 
number began to give his ideas. Pretty soon it 
was evident to everybody that the speaker was 
simply describing Dobie. 

Middling tall, sturdily built, there is about 
him something that belongs to the out-of-doors, 
that belongs to men who have spent much time 
on horses and feel comfortable inside a house 
only when it is understood that before long 
they will be able to get out again. A pair of 

[ 7 ] 


LITERATURE ON THE TEXAS PLAINS 


as frank steel-blue eyes as ever gazed squarely 
into yours, dark hair that is beginning to gray 
and has a habit of getting towsled, a drawling 
southern voice, and deliberation in thought and 
movement. After the blueness of his eyes, one 
is likely to become aware of a disarming smile 
and his unaffected way of meeting you as man 
to man. Dobie has the plainsman’s instinctive 
courtesy toward strangers. Talking with him, 
the writer was suddenly struck with what 
seemed a likeness to Will Rogers, who hails 
from Oklahoma. This resemblance, it seems, 
has been frequently remarked, the two might 
be blood brothers. 

Frank Dobie comes by his Texas heritage 
naturally, for he is of the third generation of 
Texans. Both his father and grandfather 
were natives and spent their lives as ranchmen 
and trail drivers. He was born on a ranch in 
Live Oak County, Texas, forty-two years ago— 
the eldest of a family of six. 

His mother, before her marriage, had taught 
music and had been a teacher in a public 
school. She read to the children and started 
them off. A governess came next, and then 
four or five neighbors joined together and built 
[ 8 ] 


LITERATURE ON THE TEXAS PLAINS 


a schoolhouse on the Dobie ranch. The teacher 
always lived in the Dobie household. 

Dobie is sure he must have learned some¬ 
thing at the school, for besides a distinct 
memory of learning to spell “irksome” from 
failing in a spelling match, he says droves 
of wild turkeys used to graze up close to 
the school building. There were coyotes about, 
too. The boys would set traps to be left over¬ 
night, and often at one of the recesses there 
was a coyote to skin. A favorite game was 
“cats and dogs,” in which some of the children 
were wild cats trying to get away from the 
others—the dogs. Most of the children— 
fifteen or twenty—rode to school on horseback; 
so the dogs were frequently mounted in pur¬ 
suit of the cats. Dense thickets—Live Oak 
County is down in the brush country along the 
Nueces River—gave the cats plenty of oppor¬ 
tunity to get away. 

Dobie no more remembers learning to ride 
a horse than learning to walk, but he does 
recall that the blue bonnets grew so tall in the 
spring of the year they swished against his 
stirrups as he galloped across the country. 

In 1904 he went to live with his grandparents 
[9] 


LITERATURE ON THE TEXAS PLAINS 


in Alice, forty miles away, where he attended 
high school. Southwestern University at 
Georgetown followed, and he was graduated 
from there in 1910, with the degree of Bachelor 
of Arts. It was at college that he learned to 
love poetry, and he thought that if he could be 
an English teacher he would have the chance 
to indulge that love. But he will tell you dryly 
that later he was to find out the appreciation of 
literature and the ability to convey that appre¬ 
ciation meet with small regard among the 
majority of orthodox Ph. D. professors of Eng¬ 
lish. (Dobie hates the pedantic side of aca¬ 
demic life and cannot resist the temptation to 
crack a pedantic pate whenever he sees one 
too baldly exposed.) 

After college he spent a summer reporting 
criminal cases, fires, and the activities at the 
morgue, for the San Antonio Express, and then 
two years as a teacher in the Alpine High 
School and the preparatory department of 
Southwestern University. Next he studied in 
New York City at Columbia, where in 1914 
he received his M. A. degree. He then came 
to Austin to teach at the University of Texas, 
and it is with the University he has been chiefly 
[10} 


LITERATURE ON THE TEXAS PLAINS 


associated ever since, though there have been 
interruptions in his teaching there which have 
had an important bearing on his whole career. 

In 1917-1919 he was in the army, and won 
his commission as first lieutenant in the 116th 
Field Artillery. He was sent to France, but 
too late for the fighting. 

Back in civilian life, he came to Austin for 
another year’s teaching, when he “quit in dis¬ 
gust,” to manage the ranch of his Uncle Jim 
Dobie. Jim Dobie was one of the old-time 
cattlemen of the brush country between the 
Nueces River and the Rio Grande. His ranch, 
“Los Olmos” (the Elms), together with adja¬ 
cent range under lease, contained 200,000 acres 
and lay in three counties—La Salle, Duval, and 
Webb. Here Frank, more commonly known 
by the Spanish, Pancho, was the only white 
man on the place. He had under his charge 
10,000 head of cattle and eight to thirty Mex¬ 
icans, according to the season. 

He spent a year on “Los Olmos,” and it was 
while he was there that he stumbled quite by 
accident upon the thing that was to make him 
known far beyond the borders of Texas. 

The brush country is a land of little rain. 

Ik] 


LITERATURE ON THE TEXAS PLAINS 


Water is so scarce that it takes on enormous 
importance in the lives of the people. Dobie 
became fascinated with the vast number of 
weather superstitions current among the Mexi¬ 
cans. If a coyote barked on the hill after sun¬ 
rise—if the cattle were restless—if rattlesnakes 
moved about during hot weather—nearly 
everything that happened was interpreted folk 
fashion, as a sign of rain or sun. He found it 
interesting to collect these traditions. 

Among the Mexicans on the ranch was one 
Santos, who had been a rural in Old Mexico 
(something like a ranger in Texas). He was 
a shepherd, a hunter, and a sort of pastoral mid¬ 
wife, helping the goats to kid. Santos was very 
wise in the ways of wild life and at night he 
would come up to the ranch house to talk with 
Dobie—because, he said, he liked to talk with 
people who did not ask him about the weather. 
In a mixture of English and Spanish, the pair 
would converse, and the Mexican told many 
tales about ghosts. The things that Santos said 
all fitted into Dobie’s own Texas background. 
(An old “Spanish fort” on his own father’s 
ranch was haunted and has for sixty or seventy 
years been the site of treasure digging.) One 


LITERATURE ON THE TEXAS PLAINS 


night after Santos left, Dobie, while reading a 
collection of John Lomax’s cowboy songs, sud¬ 
denly thought of making a similar collection 
of folk-tales. That was the beginning. 

In the past ten years he has ridden thousands 
of miles and talked with hundreds of old trail 
drivers, cowboys, goatherds, pioneer men and 
pioneer women, children of pioneers—anybody 
who he thought had a story to tell. He has 
listened and as nearly on the spot as he could, 
he has written down what they said. For in¬ 
stance, not long ago, while on his way to trail 
down the Lost Tayopa Mine in Sonora, he met 
a ranchman in the Gunter Hotel at San 
Antonio, who took two hours to tell him the 
story of a Mexican finding silver in a cave in 
Old Mexico. On the train that night, he wrote 
out every detail as nearly as he could remember 
it, for he says, “It’s the details that make a 
story—details that make history vivid. And if 
you don’t write them down while they are fresh 
in your mind, you lose them.” Once written 
down, he puts the story away in his files and 
may not look at it again for years. 

His filing cabinets are peculiarly interesting, 
for in them today lie what will become a large 
[13] 


LITERATURE ON THE TEXAS PLAINS 


part of his future work. A number of years 
ago he began to keep them and there now, 
under such heads as “O. Henry—Treasure 
Hunter,” “Longhorns,” “Mustangs,” “Trail 
Bosses,” “Trail Cooks,” “Stampedes,” he files 
away anything on the subject that comes to his 
attention. Already he has brewing enough 
work to keep one man busy more than a life¬ 
time. 

A good many people have sensed the pic¬ 
turesqueness of Southwestern folk-lore and 
some of them have attempted to write it down, 
but usually they have lacked either the training 
in technique to get accurately on paper what 
they knew, or if the education was there, they 
have not been able to bring themselves close 
enough to the “folks” to learn their lore. Lit¬ 
erary writers have a way of patronizing the 
sources of folk tradition or else overwriting 
them, and both attitudes are deadly. In Dobie 
there is a combination which is specially happy 
for just the work he has undertaken. 

A great deal of reading in history is necessary 
for a background in collecting folk legends, he 
says, because legends—the wildest legends even 
—somehow grow out of history. He has an 
[14] 


LITERATURE ON THE TEXAS PLAINS 

active love for books. When he was a fresh¬ 
man at Southwestern, Doctor Robert Hyer, the 
president, asked him if he liked to read. He 
answered that he did and Dr. Hyer said, 
“Make a habit of reading one good book a 
week.” The remark, coming from a man 
Dobie much admired, had a profound effect 
on him and for years he followed the advice, 
until his reading grew to several books a week. 

No amount of research is too much for him 
if it serves to clear up some doubtful point. 
Once he spent two days in the library looking 
over old diaries, newspapers, and maps, trying 
to find the history and exact location of the 
old “Laredo Crossing,” long disused, on the 
Nueces River (it comes in Qoronado’s Chil¬ 
dren). He remarked, “I don’t know why I 
should go to so much trouble to get locations 
right when the whole story is just a legend, but 
I can’t help it.” Perhaps the answer is in the 
vividness and authority that come into the 
legends when he writes them down. 

When Dobie reads, like most writers, he has 
a sharp eye for his particular interests. In the 
back of his copy of Haley’s The X.I.T. %anch 
of Texas, for example, are written the words 
[15] 


LITERATURE ON THE TEXAS PLAINS 


“Brands,” “Lobo,” “Cowboy endurance,” with 
the pages where each is discussed for ready 
reference. 

To the educated person, Dobie’s background 
of books may seem little more than the appli¬ 
cation of the sound principles of scholarship. 
It is when he leaves academic halls and starts 
out to gather folk-lore first-hand that he be¬ 
comes a striking figure in the world of letters. 
Some one has said that his trick of getting cow 
hands, trail drivers, Mexicans, and the rest of 
the sons of the soil, whose tales he wants to 
hear, to talk freely to him is to leave his Eng¬ 
lish and his table manners at home. 

No doubt his ability to lay aside the em¬ 
barrassing superfluities of civilization is a help 
to him, but that is all negative. What enables 
him to get the material he is seeking is some¬ 
thing positive. To begin with, being born and 
reared in the cattle country, he probably knows 
as much about the inside of the game as the 
next man he meets, and this becomes evident 
in a thousand little ways. He can speak the 
cowmen’s language far more completely than 
merely using their manner of speech with a 
familiar drawl. His is a genuine respect for the 
[16} 


LITERATURE ON THE TEXAS PLAINS 


“folks” of this world. A respect which joined 
with an unending interest in their life and en¬ 
vironment wins them irresistibly. 

One of the most prized books in his library 
is a memento of an excursion in New Mexico. 
In it is the inscription: 

To our friend 
J. Frank Dobie 
the best college 
proffessor that 
Ever got on a horse 
Evans Brothers 
Slash Ranch 

His experience with Colonel Charles Good¬ 
night, from whom the Goodnight-Loving Trail 
half took its name, is illuminating as well as 
amusing. The first time he went to see the 
old gentleman at his ranch, Dobie found him 
civil, but obviously annoyed at one more 
stranger come to question him. Every effort 
the visitor made to get the old cattleman to 
talk failed, until finally, thoroughly chagrined, 
Dobie asked for a horse and went out for 
a ride. In the pasture he came across the 
palo duro plant, and quite without guile 
he brought back some specimens to ask 
[17] 


LITERATURE ON THE TEXAS PLAINS 


about. His interest was so sincere that it had 
a magic effect upon Colonel Goodnight. Then 
and there began a real friendship which lasted 
until the old trail driver passed on. 

Once when he was out walking with a col¬ 
league who is one of his closest friends, the two 
met an ancient, white-haired Mexican astride 
a burro. Dobie spoke to him in Spanish; the 
man’s face lighted up and for five minutes they 
talked, quite forgetting the professor who was 
standing by. As the Mexican rode away and 
the two men walked on, Dobie said simply to 
his friend: “I’d rather spend a day talking with 
that old man than with you.” 

The old pioneers all seem anxious that the 
story of the range shall be written down cor¬ 
rectly, and Dobie has never met a man with a 
tale to tell who was not willing to tell it. His 
problem is not finding material, but giving the 
material that he gets flavor and proportion. A 
curious aspect of his writing down legends is 
that before he puts them in final form, he feels 
he must visit the actual place of their setting 
and see for himself the topography of the 
country. Even when the legend is most fanci¬ 
ful this is true. In almost every one of the 
Ci8] 


LITERATURE ON THE TEXAS PLAINS 


tales about lost mines and buried treasure he 
recounts in Qoironados Children, he has visited 
the scene and gone carefully over the land. 

When it comes to actual writing, Dobie’s 
method of work is much like other authors 
who make writing a serious business. Some¬ 
times the words come easily; again a page will 
have to be rewritten a dozen times or a para¬ 
graph “tinkered with” for days, before the sen¬ 
tences “sing like a fiddle” and he is willing to 
let them stand. Sentences that “sing like a 
fiddle” are his particular ideal. 

He sits at his typewriter usually wearing his 
hat, and he reads what he has written aloud to 
get the lilt of it. His wife can hear his voice 
from a distance and she has a pretty good idea 
of the way things are progressing from the 
sound of it. 

In 1916 Frank Dobie married Bertha McKee 
of Velasco, Texas, whom he had known in his 
college days at Southwestern. In this lady he 
has found a companion who has made much of 
his best work possible. Mrs. Dobie has proved 
not only an invaluable critic—she has given his 
work every encouragement, at one time taking 
a position and teaching herself in order to give 
[19] 


LITERATURE ON THE TEXAS PLAINS 


him more leisure to write. Her special field 
is plants and gardens, and her interests have 
stimulated her husband. Probably the best 
single chapter in his book, Vaquero of the 
''Brush Country, is the one giving a detailed 
description of the plant life in the brush 
country. 

In all his concern with folk-lore and folk¬ 
tales, Dobie’s primary interest is with the 
human side. He is positively impatient with 
those folk-lorists who approach the subject im¬ 
personally as a science. And he is sure that 
in the folk spirit lies the hope of American lit¬ 
erature. “When American life is correctly 
interpreted in books, it will be by some one 
who can get flavor of the common, folksy 
people. The hardiest people in English litera¬ 
ture are people of the soil. Take Shakespeare’s 
’ostlers in ‘Henry IV.’ or the grave diggers in 
‘Hamlet.’ Despite the fact that Thomas 
Hardy’s major creations—tragic figures—are 
introspective and profoundly pessimistic, his 
characters that live heartily and provoke in 
readers a sympathetic gusto are folks close to 
the soil, and the same can be said of the char¬ 
acters of George Eliot. And one thing is sure, 
{>] 


LITERATURE ON THE TEXAS PLAINS 


writers who set out to patronize folks are not 
going to succeed in interpreting them.” His 
own aims he summed up in the words, “I want 
to help to put down the land to which I 
belong.” 

That land is the range country from Texas 
on up west of the Missouri River into the 
Northwest. In the search for pasture, the old 
cattlemen roamed far. 

When Dobie gave up teaching to manage 
“Los Olmos,” he probably thought he was say¬ 
ing good-bye to college halls forever. But after 
a year of the ranch, he began to long “to do 
something besides ride the prickly pear the rest 
of his life.” Probably the truth of the matter 
was, in those conversations with Santos, he had 
come upon the thing that all along he had been 
casting about to find. 

In 1921 he was back again at the University 
of Texas. The year 1923 took him to Still¬ 
water, Oklahoma, to be head of the department 
of English of Oklahoma A. & M. But after two 
years’ absence he came back to the University 
of Texas, as adjunct professor; the next year he 
was advanced to an associate professorship. 
Recently he has spent more time in research 

[21] 


LITERATURE ON THE TEXAS PLAINS 


and writing than in actual teaching, and in 
1930, in recognition of what he has done, he 
was granted a year’s leave of absence from the 
University with full pay from the Laura Spell¬ 
man Rockefeller Fund, to gather and set down 
the lore of the ranges and folk of Texas. 

One of Dobie’s most significant contributions 
to Texas letters has been his activity in connec¬ 
tion with the Texas Folk-Lore Society and its 
publications. 

This organization, founded in 1909 by John 
Lomax, then of Texas A. & M., and L. W. 
Payne, Jr., of the University of Texas, brought 
out a single volume of collected material in 
1916, and became inactive owing to the War. 
On Dobie’s return to Austin he was instru¬ 
mental in reviving it, and, as secretary, has 
edited seven additional volumes of Texas lore, 
which the Society has issued from time to time 
since 1923. 

One of these publications, The Legends of 
Texas, was published when the Society had 
neither funds nor machinery of organiza¬ 
tion. Within six months an edition of 1500 
copies had been sold; an additional 1250 


LITERATURE ON THE TEXAS PLAINS 


copies were printed. All these were sold and 
hundreds more could have been disposed of to 
lost mine hunters. The original price was 
$2.50. Now, when a copy turns up, it brings 
from $5 to $10. 

Dobie was not neglectful of his folk interests 
while he was at Stillwater. There he helped 
revive the Oklahoma Folk-Lore Society, which, 
like the Texas group, had become dormant, 
and he gathered a great deal of Oklahoma 
lore. 

In addition to editing the publications of 
the Texas Folk-Lore Society and contributing 
numerous articles to magazines, Dobie has pub¬ 
lished one volume besides Coronados Children. 
In 1929 appeared Vaquero of the "Brush 
Country, in which, around the figure of John 
Young, one of the pioneer cowmen, the author 
has woven the story of the Southwest range 
country in which he grew up. 

It seems more than mere chance in the de¬ 
velopment of a regional culture that just when 
Frank Dobie should have been ready to publish 
his first book, a young publishing organization 
specializing in books of the Southwest should 
Da] 


LITERATURE ON THE TEXAS PLAINS 


be waiting to take it. The Southwest Press of 
Dallas, which in the last three years has pub¬ 
lished more than forty volumes of regional 
interest by Southwestern authors, were the pub¬ 
lishers of Vaquero of the "Brush Qountry, 
and have also brought out Qoronado’s Chil¬ 
dren, 

Coronado's Children is made up of legends, 
and these legends will some day have their 
undisputed place in our literature, but it must 
not be thought that these tales of lost mines and 
buried treasures belong to a dead past. The 
most interesting thing about them is that 
while they have their origin in dim tradition, 
today they are as alive as ever and are still 
growing. 

A legend, as Dobie defines it—“is not history, 
though a legend may be true to the spirit of 
history. It is not a yarn invented by some 
imaginative person. The other day a teacher 
wrote me that not having been able to find a 
legend about a certain hill in her vicinity, she 
and her class made up one. The result was 
interesting, but not a legend. A legend is tradi¬ 
tional; that is, it has been handed down by 
[24] 


LITERATURE ON THE TEXAS PLAINS 


word of mouth until no one knows how it 
originated. It usually has some basis of fact. 
It may have supernatural elements in it.” 

Hundreds of men and women living now in 
the Southwest believe these tales of buried 
treasure sufficiently to dig deep holes in the 
rockiest kind of ground. When Dobie’s 
account of “The Lost Nigger Mine” which 
is in Coronado's Children, originally ap¬ 
peared in Holland's ^Magazine, he re¬ 
ceived dozens of letters, many of them 
from people away from Texas, wanting 
“more information.” “Of course,” he explains, 
“I had already told all I knew and then 
some.” As a result of the story’s publication, 
a perfect deluge of seekers have been down in 
the Big Bend country hunting. 

Something in the romance of looking for 
buried treasure keeps men from being dis¬ 
couraged by failure to find it. Dobie estimates 
that, all told, probably a million dollars has 
been spent looking for the lost Bowie Mine, 
and he is sure that there has not been a time 
in the last ninety years when some man was not 
hunting for it. He adds, “When I say dozens 

1 > 5 ] 


LITERATURE ON THE TEXAS PLAINS 


of men are looking for it now, I am not exag¬ 
gerating.” 

Due to his published stories on lost treasure, 
he has come to be regarded in the minds of 
treasure hunters as something of an authority 
on the subject. A week seldom goes by without 
someone’s coming to see him personally or 
writing to him concerning the Bowie Mine or 
some other hidden lode. More than once he 
has been approached by men who wanted him 
to enter with them into a corporation for fur¬ 
nishing maps, etc., to prospectors for money. 
A representative of one of the outdoor mag¬ 
azines assured him he was in touch with hun¬ 
dreds of adventure-loving men over the world 
and showed him just how they could both get 
rich furnishing these “fellows” leads. 

Do not think that these treasure hunters are 
mere adventurers. Plenty of sober stay-at-home 
business men, professional men, laborers, yearn 
to go in search of some treasure or mine about 
which they have heard plausible stories. The 
ordinary man wants to run away from machin¬ 
ery and plow-horse routine. He wants to be 
pointed to the rainbow’s end. He wants to 
know where there is land not plowed up, land 


LITERATURE ON THE TEXAS PLAINS 


with secrets and strange possibilities of wealth. 

One of the people who has furnished Dobie 
much of his material about markings that point 
the way to buried treasure is a successful lawyer 
in a large city. These two letters, secured from 
Dobie’s file, will show you how wide is the 
human appeal of the literature he is finding 
on the Texas plains: 

Quick Service Shoe Shop 


Box 96 . 

Mr. J. Frank Dobie, 

Austin, Texas 

Dear Sir 
Mr. Daugherty 

of this place asked me to rite you in regards to Berried 
Treasure he says that you can give me lots of good 
infmation as to how and where to find them 
I mean the Location or there about I have herd of 
several places but I am Doubtful of some of these 
places. Do you have any record of hurried treasure 
in lamb county Texas, or in Camp County or in 
benton County Ark.? 

I will Appraite any infmation that you can give me 
on this 

Very Truly Yours 




( Signature) 






LITERATURE ON THE TEXAS PLAINS 


And this: 


Oklahoma 


I am writing to you for a little information 

is there any thing to the hurried tresure story 

that Mr. Dobie Writes 

abut and can I get a 

map of this treasure 

that is hurried 

it ant doing any body any good hurried under the 
ground if a poor Widow could find it it would 
help feed a lot of little hungry mouths 
I no of lot of Mexican Marks but dont understand 
them these marks are in texas if I could get a map 
could find any thing I would be glad to divide also 
I no of a few places in Colorado mountains my great 
uncle lives dost to these 2 springs 
Jeff Davis Co this Mr. J Frank Dobie tells of several 
places that I no of but I dont understand the marks 
and feet any information will be appicated 


(1 Signature) 



Reprinted with additional material 
from Holland's 0 Magazine 



[28] 





CONCERNING THE BIBLIOGRAPHY 
WHICH FOLLOWS 

Recently at the University of Texas, Pro¬ 
fessor Dobie gave one of the first courses ever 
offered on “Life and Literature of the South¬ 
west.” In connection with this course, he com¬ 
piled a syllabus dealing with the Southwest in 
its various aspects. 

His material was prepared to serve the 
informality of the classroom. He wished to 
offer a bibliography which should be repre¬ 
sentative rather than comprehensive, but he had 
no idea of publishing it. 

He has brought together so much interesting 
information about books and authors of this 
region, however,—information which is no¬ 
where else easily obtainable,—that his compila¬ 
tion has a far wider usefulness than merely to 
help a specific group of students. With the 
growing attention to our native background, 
such concise and practical suggestions about 
material on the Southwest will be welcomed in 
many places. 


LITERATURE ON THE TEXAS PLAINS 


Conscious of his original idea, Professor 
Dobie was somewhat reluctant to allow this 
syllabus to reach the formality of the printed 
page. But he has consented, and it is offered 
as the most important part of this little book. 


[30] 


LIFE AND LITERATURE OF THE 
SOUTHWEST 

“By Frank Dobie 


(Note: r Boo\s out of print are marked with an 


asterisk) 



VERY new country has its pioneers, its 


-*—■ 1 basic stock, who give it individuality and 
flavor. The basic, or soil, stock of the Southwest 
was as individual in its way as the soil stock 
that made New England. The printed expres¬ 
sion of early New Englanders like Jonathan 
Edwards and the Mathers has long been famil¬ 
iar to students of American literature; almost 
nothing expressive of the genius of the South¬ 
west has been seriously regarded. Such an ex¬ 
pression, however, exists. That it is pure litera¬ 
ture, no one will claim; that it is more readable 
than the Edwards-Mather “literature,” few 
people who taste of it will deny. 

In taking up the printed expression of the 
Southwest, one is immediately confronted with 
the variable nature of the region as a geograph¬ 
ical unit. Sometimes the Southwest runs up to 


[31] 


LITERATURE ON THE TEXAS PLAINS 


include Missouri; often it reaches over into 
Louisiana; logically it should include Cali¬ 
fornia. While for the present purposes Mis¬ 
souri, Louisiana, and California will not be dis¬ 
regarded, emphasis will be thrown on Texas, 
New Mexico, and Arizona, with also some con¬ 
sideration of Oklahoma and Arkansas. 

SPANISH ELEMENT 

Considered in any way, the Southwest has 
been enormously influenced by the Spanish 
tradition. Spanish chronicles afford an in¬ 
teresting study. The following books supply 
a good introduction to this field: Transla¬ 
tion of Cabeza de Vaca’s journey across Texas 
by Fanny Bandelier (Allerton Book Com¬ 
pany, 142 E. 59th St., N. Y. City, 1922) 
and by Thomas Buckingham Smith (long out 
of print); *the Qilded <J\dan (Cl Dorado) 
and Other Pictures of Spanish Occupancy of 
t America, by A. F. Bandelier (New York, 
1893); 'the Qoronado expedition, 1540-1542, 
translation by George Parker Winship, in 
Fourteenth Annual Report of The Bureau 
of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithson¬ 
ian Institution, Part I (Washington, D. C., 


LITERATURE ON THE TEXAS PLAINS 


1869); Spanish explorations in the Southwest, 
edited by H. E. Bolton (Chas. Scribner’s Sons, 
New York, 1916); Hernando He Soto, by 
Cunninghame Graham (William Heinemann, 
London, 1912). Perhaps one cannot get the 
temper of the Spanish conquistadores in any 
pleasanter way than by reading Prescott’s C on ~ 
quest of ^Mexico, available in several editions. 

Various histories of Texas treat more or less 
fully of the Spanish and French periods. This 
is not a history syllabus, but the literature of the 
world certainly includes a good deal of history. 
So far as I know, no history of Texas dealing 
with social and cultural backgrounds in the 
manner of Macaulay and Green has ever been 
attempted. Nevertheless, Texas historical “lit¬ 
erature” is rather voluminous. An excellent 
appraisal of these historical works will be found 
in Chapter XIX, “Bibliography,” of Eugene C. 
Barker’s masterful Life of Stephen F. Austin 
(The Southwest Press, Dallas, 1925)—a work 
in which biographical analysis and depiction 
rise to the level of true literary expression. 
Since the writing of that chapter Doctor 
Barker’s own Readings in Texas History (The 
Southwest Press, Dallas, 1929) must be added 
[33] 


LITERATURE ON THE TEXAS PLAINS 


to the list of Texas historical works; it is a 
comprehensive work in more senses than one. 
c Al\ali Trails, by W. C. Holden (Southwest 
Press, Dallas, 1930) presents the economic and 
social history of West Texas. The ‘Raven, a 
biography of Sam Houston, by Marquis James 
(The Bobbs-Merrill Co., Indianapolis) won the 
Pulitzer Prize of 1930. 

Other states of the Southwest all have their 
historians. Louisiana has been particularly for¬ 
tunate in having such literary figures as George 
W. Cable and Grace King treat of its history; 
at the same time the scholarly historian Fortier 
did not fail to regard cultural backgrounds. 
Had Herndon in his Qentennial History of 
Arkansas done nothing else but write of “The 
Arkansas Traveler” and of Albert Pike, he 
would be entitled to mention. Thoburn and 
Dale are authorities on Oklahoma history. 
Prince and Twitchell are the standard refer¬ 
ences for New Mexico. Doctor Joseph A. Munk 
listed and treated of nearly every item bearing 
on Arizona; an excellent account of his work 
and of Arizoniana in general is to be found in 
the last chapter of Frank C. Lockwood’s de¬ 
lightful c Arizona Character (Times-Mirror 
[34] 


LITERATURE ON THE TEXAS PLAINS 


Press, Los Angeles, California, 1928). The vol¬ 
uminous Charles F. Lummis regarded the 
Southwest as comprising “New Mexico, Ari¬ 
zona, Southern California, and adjoining parts 
of Colorado, Utah, Texas and Northern 
Mexico.” There are few phases of this South¬ 
west, from Spanish explorers and geology to 
Mexican folk-songs and Hopi snake dances, 
that Lummis did not touch—though too often 
he touched merely “to adorn” and vent his 
overweening egotism. For all that, however, 
his ^Mesa, Qanon and Vueblo (The Cen¬ 
tury Co., New York, 1925), together with other 
works, affords a valuable contribution to the 
social and cultural record of the region. 

INDIANS 

Before the Spaniard came, the Indian was. 
The Indian has been treated scientifically and 
sentimentally; he has also been treated as 
inhumanely in books as he treated and was 
treated by the Caucasians. The Bureau of 
American Ethnology, through the Publications 
of the Smithsonian Institution, affords an 
enormous fund of information on the Indians 
of the Southwest. One of the outstanding 
[35] 


LITERATURE ON THE TEXAS PLAINS 


works of America is F. W. Hodge’s *Hand- 
boo\ of American Indians (two volumes) 
wherein are to be found not only a staggering 
amount of well-classified and sifted informa¬ 
tion, but full bibliographical references to 
nearly every phase, including tribes and indi¬ 
viduals, of Indian life. The American Museum 
of Natural History, the Heye Foundation, and 
the Peabody Museum have also published very 
extensive treatises on the Indians. 

Probably the classic literary achievement 
dealing with the Indians of the Southwest is 
Bandelier’s historical novel, The Delight 
c J\da\ers (Dodd, Mead & Co., New York). 
Within recent years a new school of writers has 
arisen to treat seriously of the Indian in an 
artistic way; among them the names of Witter 
Bynner, Mary Austin, Alice Corbin Henderson, 
Oliver La Farge, and Stanley Vestal stand out. 
They are closely allied with the artist groups 
of Taos and Santa Fe. George Bird Grinnell’s 
Fighting Qheyennes (Scribner’s, New York) 
and hong Lance by Chief Buffalo Child Long 
Lance (Cosmopolitan Book Corporation, New 
York, 1928) hardly belong to the Southwest, 
but anyone who wants to understand the genius 
[36] 


LITERATURE ON THE TEXAS PLAINS 


of the Plains Indians will read these two books. 
Long Lance is a book that will live. Critics 
say that Oliver La Farge’s Laughing Boy 
(Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston) will 
live also. 

It is extraordinary that no outstanding book 
on the Comanches has been written. For a fine 
revelation of the Apaches one may go to Cap¬ 
tain James G. Bourke’s noble *On 7 he 'Border 
With Qroo\ (London, 1892), and now we have 
Britton Davis’ 7 he 7 ruth <About Qeronimo 
(Yale University Press, 1929). Some interest¬ 
ing books dealing with Apaches and Coman¬ 
ches have been written by captives: notably 
Nelson Lee’s rare * 7 hree Years o Among 7 he 
Qomanches, TSjne Years With 7 he Indians, by 
Herman Lehmann, and 7 he Boy Captives, by 
Clinton L. and Jefferson D. Smith, both of 
which latter books came out in 1927 under the 
patronage of Frontier 7 imes, Bandera, Texas. 

But, taking Texas as the center of the 
Southwest, let us trace the beginnings of our 
literature. Adequate treatment of the subject 
has never been made, though there are some 
helps. First, there is Raines’ # Bibliography of 
7 exas. *Lone Star Ballads, compiled by 
[37] 


LITERATURE ON THE TEXAS PLAINS 


Francis D. Allan, Galveston, 1874, is a very 
good collection of patriotic verse of early day 
Texas and the Confederacy. In 1885 Sam H. 
Dixon issued an anthology entitled *The Voets 
And Toetry of Texas. Voices of The South¬ 
west, edited by Hilton R. Greer (Macmillan 
Co., New York, 1923) surveys the whole field 
of Texas poetry up to the date of its publica¬ 
tion. D. F. Eagleton’s # Writers And Writings 
of Texas (New York, 1913) is almost worthless, 
and his *Texas Literature Trader (Dallas, 
1916) is entirely so. Two brochures treat the 
subject of Texas literature in an orderly but 
very summary manner: “Literature and Art in 
Texas,” by J. Frank Dobie, which is Chapter 
XV in The r Boo\ of Texas (published by the 
Grolier Society, Dallas, 1929), and a handy 
monograph by L. W. Payne, Jr., A Survey of 
Texas Literature (Rand McNally & Co., Chi¬ 
cago, 1928). 

The Southwest in Literature, an anthology by 
Mabel Major and Rebecca W. Smith (The 
Macmillan Company, New York, 1929), offers 
many suggestions for the study of a wide field. 
An anthology that limits itself to modern 
poetry of *he Southwest is The Qolden Stallion, 
[38] 


LITERATURE ON THE TEXAS PLAINS 


by D. Maitland Bushby (The Southwest Press, 
Dallas, Texas, 1930). 

EARLY FICTION 

Ambrosio De Letinez, or The First Texian 
ISiovel (originally called rJVLexico Versus 
Texas) by A. T. Myrthe (the pseudonym of 
Anthony Ganilk), Philadelphia, 1838, marks a 
begining of fiction pertaining to Texas. The 
first fiction writer of importance to use Texas 
as a theme was Charles Wilkins Webber (1819- 
1856). *Tales of The Southern "Border, *Old 
Hic\s The Quide, and *Qold 0 Mines of The 
Qila are, in the order given, his best fictional 
works. As naturalist and adventurer he spent 
some time in Texas. For a sketch of his life, 
see Library of Southern Literature . 

Alfred W. Arrington (1810-1867), who used 
the pseudonym of Charles Summerfield, wrote 
one novel still worth reading for the picture it 
gives of feudalistic lawlessness: *The gangers 
and "Regulators of The Tanaha, or Life 
<Among the Lawless : t A Tale of the Republic 
of Texas, 1857. 

Arrington, however, was not the story teller 
that Jeremiah Clemens (1814-1865) was. His 
C39] 


LITERATURE ON THE TEXAS PLAINS 


Bernard Lisle , 1853, and his *<J\Austang Qray, 
1857, are “bully” good yarns revealing much of 
actuality. 

Mayne Reid (1818-1883) was a professional 
writer who for nearly a third of a century ex¬ 
ploited Texas and the Southwest. A good 
appreciation of him is to be found in Lummis’ 
cJWesa, Canon and Vuehlo, pp. 16-19, and he 
is the subject of two biographies, neither of 
them worth reading. Representative novels out 
of a score or more that Reid wrote are *The 
Trifle gangers, *T he Scalp Hunters, * 7 ‘he War 
Trail : The Hunt of The Wild Horse, *The 
Headless Horseman, *The Death Shot, and 
*The Lone %anch: Tale of The Staked 

Plain, 

Karl Postl (1793-1864), a German who wrote 
under the name of Charles Sealsfield, gave in 
*The Qahin "Bool^, which is known also as 
* ^Adventures in Texas , a fictional mixture of 
facts and fancies. He and .other German 
writers of Texas have been well treated of by 
Selma Metzenthin Raunick in “A Survey of 
German Literature in Texas,” Southwestern 
Historical Quarterly, Vol. XXXII, No. 2, 
October, 1929. 

Uo] 


LITERATURE ON THE TEXAS PLAINS 


Gustave Aimard (1818-1883), a Frenchman, 
belongs to the Arkansas scene more than to 
Texas. He was only a little less extravagant 
than Captain Marryat, who in * 7 Aarrative of 
The Travels and Adventures of J\donsieur 
Violet, etc., hashed up a considerable amount 
of material dealing with buffalo stampedes and 
the like. 


MEMOIRS AND JOURNALS 

More vivid, realistic, romantic, and readable 
than all the early fiction are certain memoirs, 
travels, and other chronicle material dealing 
with Texas and the Southwest. David Crockett’s 
t Autobiography and the puzzling Qolonel 
Qroc\ett’s Exploits and Adventures in Texas 
are still deservedly reprinted. (With an intro¬ 
duction by Hamlin Garland both the ^Auto¬ 
biography and the Exploits are to be found in 
one of the “Modern Student’s Library” vol¬ 
umes issued by Chas. Scribner’s Sons, New 
York). Gusty and thrilling is Peter Bean’s 
0 Memoir , dealing with prison life in Mexico. 
It was first printed by Yoakum in his * History 
of Texas. In 1929 it was reprinted by Mark 
Van Doren in Autobiography of 'America; in 
DO 


LITERATURE ON THE TEXAS PLAINS 


1930 it was issued as a separate volume, illus¬ 
trated by Dave Williams, by the Book Club of 
Texas, Dallas, which limits its editions to 
membership. 

The prisons of Mexico inspired some ex¬ 
traordinary memoirs. Several of the Mier 
prisoners wrote, chief among such works being 
General Thomas Jefferson Green’s * Journal of 
The Texian expedition gainst 0 Mier . This 
is well supplemented by *The Prisoners of 
Terote, by William P. Stapp. The author of 
*TSlarrative of The Texas Santa Fe Expedition 
(first printed in New York in 1844 and subse¬ 
quently reprinted in England), was a journalist 
of ability named George W. Kendall, and his 
two volumes deserve to rank almost beside 
Dana’s Two Tears before The <Jldast. 

Washington Irving’s delightful Tour on 
The Prairies (first published in 1835 and now 
available in separate form from the Harlow 
Publishing Co., Oklahoma City) belongs to the 
same period. So do the two extraordinary 
books of travel and observation by an English 
Gentleman and adventurer, George Frederick 
Ruxton. For a sketch—padded—of him, see 
G. B. Grinnell’s "Beyond The Old Frontier. 

[42] 


LITERATURE ON THE TEXAS PLAINS 


His first book, Adventures in JVlexico and 
The %oc\y ^Mountains, deals with a saddle 
trip across Mexico in 1846 and on up into New 
Mexico. His second book, Life in The Far 
West, has afforded inspiration for both Harvey 
Fergusson’s novel, Wolf Song, and Stanley Ves¬ 
tal’s biography Kit Qarson (Houghton Mifflin 
Co., Boston, 1928); no better picture of the 
Mountain Men has ever been made, nor can one 
ask for any better picture. (Under the titles 
Wild Life in The T(pc\y JSAountains and In 
The Old West Ruxton can be procured in pop¬ 
ular priced form through the “Adventure 
Library” edition published by Macmillan, New 
York.) At the same time one must be thank¬ 
ful that Lewis H. Garrard (1829-?) wrote 
Wah-To-Yah and the Taos Trail (first pub¬ 
lished in 1850 and now edited by Stanley 
Vestal-Waiter S. Campbell—for the Harlow 
Publishing Company, Oklahoma City). Bay¬ 
ard Taylor’s *£l Dorado, or, Adventures in 
the Tath of Cmpire (1850) is the record of an 
observant man who went as far west as one 
could go in the days of ’49. 

John C. Duval (1819-1897), who was with 
Fannin at Goliad, did not write until late in 
[43] 


LITERATURE ON THE TEXAS PLAINS 


life, but when he did write he wrote with such 
richness concerning early day Texas that he is 
entitled to be called Father of Texas Litera¬ 
ture. He is the author of three published 
volumes, all of them brief: Early Times in 
Texas, The Young Explorers, and The ^Ad¬ 
ventures of "Big Foot Wallace, Texas "Banger 
and Hunter, all these books printed by Gam- 
mel’s Book Store, Austin, Texas. For sketch 
of his life see article by William Corner 
(author of a history of San Antonio) in the 
Quarterly of the Texas State Historical Associ¬ 
ation, July, 1897. 

Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903) came 
to Texas in 1856 and forthwith wrote his very 
illuminating *A Journey Through Texas. 
Captain Randolph B. Marcy’s *Exploration of 
"Fed F^ver (1854) * Thirty Years of 

Army Life on the "Border (1866), deals with 
a region north and west of the settled districts 
that Olmsted visited. 

*Wild Sports in the Far West, by Frederick 
Gerstaecker (i860), deals mostly with the 
Arkansas region; it is a revealing book not 
only about hunting, but about the way frontier 
folk lived, and is intensely interesting. Read- 

[ 44 ] 


LITERATURE ON THE TEXAS PLAINS 


ing of it might well be followed by Fred W. 
Allsopp’s Life of ^Albert Tike (1809-1891), the 
most renowned of Arkansas writers (Parke- 
Harper Company, Little Rock, Arkansas, 
1928). Thomas Bangs Thorpe, who wrote 
*The Hive of the "Bee Hunter (1854) an d other 
works, gives, with Gerstaecker, about the best 
realization of wild life and early hunters to 
be found. 

Of all books of travel dealing with Texas 
since the Civil War, two stand out as preemi¬ 
nent: *The C°ming Empire, or Two Thou¬ 
sand <J\/liles in Texas on Horseback (1877) by 
N. A. Taylor, beside whose name on the title 
page stands—without justification—that of 
H. F. McDanield; and # Ow a <JMexican J\Aus - 
tang Through Texas (1883), by Alex. E. Sweet 
and J. Armoy Knox. 

Mark Twain’s %oughing It is, of course, in a 
class by itself and pertains to the Far West. 
John JHarsh, Tioneer, by George D. Lyman 
(Chas. Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1930) is 
sheer literature as well as the record of an ex¬ 
traordinary man who trailed across the early 
West both north and south. Worthy to stand 
beside the life of John Marsh is Fremont, by 
[45] 


LITERATURE ON THE TEXAS PLAINS 


Allan Nevins (Harper & Brothers, New York, 
1928). It is cheering to see writers of the skill, 
fidelity, and valiancy that Stanley Vestal and 
George D. Lyman have demonstrated emerg¬ 
ing through the dust that a caballada of tame 
jackasses trying to play wild, Zane Grey in the 
lead of them, have been stirring up over the 
trails of the Southwest and the West for a good 
many moons now. 

*The Tlains and the Rockies: TSib- 

liography of Original Narratives of Travel and 
c .Adventure, by Wagner (1921), was printed in 
a very limited edition and now is to be found 
almost exclusively in big libraries; it affords an 
excellent guide for much Western material. 
The Tioneer West, compiled by Joseph Lewis 
French (Little, Brown & Company, Boston, 
1923), is a very poor anthology of Western 
materials. 

THE TEXAS RANGERS 

The Texas rangers have been the subject of 
much cheap fiction and of a few good books. 
Dealing with the Mexican War is Samuel C. 
Reid’s *The Scouting Expeditions of ^McCul¬ 
loch's Texas gangers. In *T{angers and Tio¬ 
neer s of Texas (1884) and in # Early Settlers 
[46] 


LITERATURE ON THE TEXAS PLAINS 


and Indian Fighters of Southwest Texas (1900) 
A. J. Sowell left a valuable record of how ran¬ 
gers and frontier settlers fought Indians. 
*Five Years a Cavalryman, by H. H. McCon¬ 
nell (1889), gives a good picture of how Fed¬ 
eral troops lived among the frontiersmen of 
whom Sowell wrote. N. A. Jennings was an 
accomplished journalist as well as an adven¬ 
turous spirit, and his Texas ganger (first 
issued by Scribners in 1899 and in 1930 re¬ 
printed by The Southwest Press, Dallas) is one 
of the most readable books that Texas has in¬ 
spired. Beside it belongs the vivid Six Years 
With the Texas gangers, by James B. Gillett, 
which was first privately printed, but which is 
now available from the Yale University Press; 
a simplified—but, in some ways, amplified— 
form of it has been issued by the World Book 
Company, Yonkers, New York. Albert Bige¬ 
low Paine, biographer of Mark Twain, wrote 
a book entitled * Captain 'EM ( J\dc r Donald, 
Texas ganger (1909). 

COWBOY AND RANCH LIFE 

Three recent volumes furnish a fairly full 
bibliography of cowboy and ranch literature. 

[47] 


LITERATURE ON THE TEXAS PLAINS 

They are: The Qowboy and His Interpreters, 
by E. Douglas Branch (D. Appleton & Com¬ 
pany, New York, 1926); The T)ay of the Qat- 
tleman, by Ernest Staples Osgood (The Univ. 
of Minn. Press, Minneapolis, 1929), and The 
Range Qattle Industry by E. E. Dale (Univ. of 
Okla. Press, Norman, Okla., 1930). 

Charles A. Siringo, author of *<A Texas 
Qowboy, later expanded into the available 
Riata and Spurs (Houghton Mifflin Company, 
Boston, 1927), began the now voluminous 
reminiscent literature dealing with cattle and 
cattle people. Such biographical material as 
Trail Drivers of Texas (a compilation avail¬ 
able through The Southwest Press, Dallas), a 
Ranchman’s Recollections, by Frank Hastings 
{"Breeders Qazette, Chicago, 1921), Fifty 
Tears on the Old Frontier, by James H. Cook 
(Yale Univ. Press, 1923), *Qowboy Life in 
Texas, or Twenty-seven Tears a <J\daveric\, by 
W. S. James, * Qowboy Life on the Western 
"Plains, by Edgar Beecher Bronson, and War - 
path and Qattle Trail, by Hubert E. Collins 
(William Morrow & Company, New York, 
1928), have carried on the tradition. *The 
Story of the Qowboy, by Emerson Hough, and 
[48] 


LITERATURE ON THE TEXAS PLAINS 


The Qowboy, by Philip Ashton Rollins (Scrib¬ 
ners, 1924), are excellent expository works on 
the subject. Two recent books, The X.I.T 
Branch of Texas, by J. Evetts Haley (The Lake¬ 
side Press, Chicago, 1929), and Vacquero of 
the ‘Brush Country, by J. Frank Dobie (The 
Southwest Press, Dallas, 1929), supplement 
each other in picturing ranch life on the plains 
and in “the lower country” respectively. To 
these works must be added Qattle (Double¬ 
day, Doran & Company, Garden City, New 
York, 1930) by two Southwesterners, William 
McLeod Raine and Will C. Barnes. 

Two fiction writers stand out as entertaining, 
true, and serious depictors of cowboy life. 
Andy Adams’ first book, The Log of a C ow ' 
hoy (1903) is, I think, destined to live for 
many generations, and whoever reads it under¬ 
standing^ will wish to read another of the 
same writer’s seven books, all issued by Hough¬ 
ton Mifflin Company, Boston. Adams’ C att ^ e 
Brands, a collection of shorter narratives, con¬ 
tains the fine story of “The Poker Steer.” Per¬ 
haps an equal of Andy Adams, though his 
cattle men belong to a later period, is Ross 
Santee, his best work so far being 
[49] 


LITERATURE ON THE TEXAS PLAINS 


(Cosmopolitan Book Company, New York, 
1928). Will James does not belong to the 
Southwest, and if he did he hardly deserves 
to be ranked with Andy Adams. 

“The Story of the Poker Steer” in Qattle 
brands invites comparison with “The Blue- 
Roan Outlaw” in Tales from the X-Bar Horse 
Camp, by Will C. Barnes ( 'Breeders Qazette, 
Chicago, 1920). An excellent horse story is 
“Corazon,” by George Patullo, to be found in 
a collection entitled # Untamed . Eugene Man- 
love Rhodes has written a half dozen novels 
far superior to the false, feeble, and flatulent 
“westerns with which they must perforce com¬ 
pete.” West Is West, Stepsons of Light, and 
Qood 0 Men and True are among the titles to 
be supplied either by Grosset & Dunlap, New 
York, or Houghton Mifflin, Boston. Mr. 
Rhodes has a natural gayety that is very 
pleasing. 

Stewart Edward White’s ^Arizona Nights 
(Grosset & Dunlap, New York), is a book to 
be starred. “Rawhide,” one of the long short- 
stories in it, is in many ways the very best short 
story that has been written with the cow coun¬ 
try for a setting. 


[50] 


LITERATURE ON THE TEXAS PLAINS 


t Arizona Nights suggests * Wolfville Nights, 
Wolf mile (Frederick A. Stokes Company, New 
York, 1897) an d Wolfville Fol\s (D. Appleton 
& Company, New York, 1908), by Alfred 
Henry Lewis, whose “Old Cattleman” with his 
tales about Bret Harte-hearted gamblers, Tuc¬ 
son Jenny, the paisano and other characters of 
Arizona and the Southwest in general are apt 
to delight some people for several generations. 
Tombstone, Arizona, is supposed to be the 
geographical prototype of Wolfville. If anyone 
wishes to know what Tombstone was like, let 
him read Helldorado, by W. M. Breakenridge 
(Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1928) or 
the sanguinary Tombstone, by Walter Noble 
Burns (Doubleday, Doran & Company, Garden 
City, New York, 1928). 

O. Henry wrote many stories that are true 
to the people and range of the old days as well 
as fascinating to readers of any day. Heart of 
the West (Doubleday, Doran & Company, Gar¬ 
den City, New York), is a volume made up 
mostly of Texas stories. Like the works of 
Bret Harte, those of O. Henry can be found 
everywhere. Much has been written on both 
writers. 


DU 


LITERATURE ON THE TEXAS PLAINS 


Among the many cultivated English gentle¬ 
men who ventured into the pioneer West was 
R. B. Townshend. His experiences in the dec¬ 
ade following the close of the Civil War fur¬ 
nished him material for three mellow, charm¬ 
ing, and also informing books published in 
England long afterwards. Townshend has a 
sense of style that but one other reminiscencer 
of the West has approached—an Englishman 
also—Ruxton. The three books are: Ten¬ 

derfoot in Qolorado (1923), The Tenderfoot in 
ISfew ^Mexico (1923), and Last ^Memories 
of a Tenderfoot (1926). The books are pub¬ 
lished by John Lane, The Bodley Head Lim¬ 
ited, London, but can be obtained in this 
country through Dodd, Mead & Company, 
New York. 

Charles M. Russell belongs to the Northwest, 
but his Trails Vlowed Under (Doubleday, 
Doran & Company, Garden City, New York, 
1927) is such a beautiful and delightful book 
that it must be remembered wherever books 
about the range are mentioned. Tales of the 
Old-Timers by Frederick R. Bechdolt (Cen¬ 
tury Company, New York, 1924) is a readable 
collection of historical narratives—authentic 
[5 2] 


LITERATURE ON THE TEXAS PLAINS 


enough for the general reader—dealing with 
range men, the emphasis being mostly on their 
fighting. Bechdolt has two other books of a 
similar character not so good. 

COWBOY SONGS 

Much has been made of cowboy songs. The 
collection of them was initiated by John A. 
Lomax, and his Qowboy Songs and Other 
Frontier Ballads (Macmillan Company, New 
York) is still the standard collection. N. How¬ 
ard Thorp’s Songs of the Qowboys (Houghton 
Mifflin Company, Boston) is an excellent com¬ 
pilation. Songs of the Open %ange, by Ina 
Sires (C. C. Birchard & Company, Boston) has 
music to about thirty of the songs. What 
Charles J. Finger says about anything need not 
be relied upon with any gravity, but his Fron - 
tier ‘Ballads (Doubelday, Doran & Company, 
Garden City, New York, 1927) has a good 
many songs. Scores of cowboy songs and other 
early day ballad forms are to be found in Texas 
and Southwestern Lore and Foller de Drin\iri 
Gou’d, the publications of the Texas Folk-Lore 
Society, edited by J. Frank Dobie, for 1927 and 
1928, respectively (Texas Folk-Lore Society, 
[53] 


LITERATURE ON THE TEXAS PLAINS 


University Station, Austin, Texas). The pub¬ 
lications of this society are replete with all man¬ 
ner of soil expression. Fol\-Say, published by 
the Oklahoma Folk-Lore Society, at Norman, 
Oklahoma, also records songs as well as other 
kinds of folk material. 

NEGRO SONGS 

In the realm of folk-songs those of the negro 
have for the last several years engaged national 
attention. Dorothy Scarborough’s On the "Trail 
of 'Njegro Fol\-Songs (Harvard University 
Press, Cambridge, 1925) deals largely with the 
songs of Texas negroes. JMellows, by R. 
Emmet Kennedy (A. & C. Boni, New York), 
is a beautiful volume made from the work 
songs, street cries, and spirituals of Louisiana. 
The last word on the whole subject is to be 
found in Newman I. White’s t American 
TSlegro Fol\-Songs (Harvard University Press, 
1928), and this very complete book contains a 
full bibliography of material relating to negro 
songs. 

BAD MEN 

A great deal of trash has been written about 
the bad men of the West and Southwest. The 

[ 54 ] 


LITERATURE ON THE TEXAS PLAINS 

FJse and Fall of Jesse James, by Robertus Love 
(G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 1926), is a 
well-written book that shows both common 
sense and a sense of values. The Saga of Filly 
the Kid, by Walter Noble Burns (Doubleday, 
Doran & Company, Garden City, New York), 
is a vivid narrative. Other aspects of the 
famous Kid may be found in *The History of 
Filly the Kid, by Charlie Siringo, and in The 
«.Authentic Life of Filly the Kid, by Pat F. 
Garrett, edited by Maurice G. Fulton (Macmil¬ 
lan, New York, 1927). 

BUFFALO SKINNERS 

“The damned old buffalo skinners,” as the 
song calls them, have, like the bad men, a 
special literature. The Life of Filly Dixon, by 
Olive K. Dixon (The Southwest Press, Dallas, 
Texas) is the best book dealing with buffalo 
hunters. *The Forder and the Fuffalo, by 
John Cook (1907) is excellent. The Hunting 
of the j Buffalo, by E. Douglas Branch (D. Ap¬ 
pleton & Company, New York, 1929) is a well- 
written historical treatise. *With Quirt and 
Spur (1909), by Edgar Rye, regards buffalo 
hunting in Northwest Texas. 

£55] 


LITERATURE ON THE TEXAS PLAINS 


NON-WESTERN BOOKS 

This list of books has emphasized the west¬ 
ern part of the Southwest. It has ignored vari¬ 
ous figures more important than some of those 
referred to, either because these figures—like 
Joaquin Miller, for example—are too well 
known to require mention or because they are 
not “rangy” enough—or maybe because this 
syllabus is too long already. Mollie E. Moore 
Davis, George W. Cable, Ruth McEnery Stuart, 
Kate Chopin, Lafcadio Hearn, Ada Jack Car¬ 
ver, and Lyle Saxon are names that any student 
of the life and literature of the eastern part of 
the Southwest will find a world of delight and 
profit in. Barry Benefield, Dorothy Scar¬ 
borough, John W. Thomason, and Donald 
Joseph are outstanding in the present genera¬ 
tion of hedonists claimed by Texas. 

The awakened interest in drama over the 
country has turned many dramatists to the soil. 
The soil of the Southwest can be savored in 
the plays—notably in ‘Bumblepuppy and in 
Judge Lynch (Samuel French, New York)— 
of John William Rogers, Texas, and of Lynn 
Riggs, Oklahoma, whose Idig La\e and %oad- 
[56] 


LITERATURE ON THE TEXAS PLAINS 


side (also published by Samuel French, New 
York) are outstanding. 

MAGAZINES 

Southwest Review, Dallas, Texas, edited 
by John H. McGinnis and Henry Smith, is the 
best exponent of Southwestern life and litera¬ 
ture that has ever been attempted. It is as good 
a magazine as Scribner's , say, and far more in¬ 
teresting to one genuinely interested in the 
Southwest. Everybody in the Southwest who 
has two dollars and an enlightened intelligence 
ought to take the Southwest Review . Hol¬ 
land's <JHagazine, Dallas, is the only re¬ 
spectable magazine in the Southwest that has 
ever made a financial success. Its appeal is to 
the whole South as well as to the Southwest. 


THIS BOOK IS SET IN 12-POINT GRANJON 
BY BRAUNWORTH & CO., INC. 

80 BROADWAY, BROOKLYN, N. Y. 


[57] 



















































































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